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Israel’s Tragedy of ‘Victories’

March 10, 2012

Exclusive: For decades, Israel and its Arab neighbors fought wars rather than make the difficult compromises that peace would require. However, over the past decade, Israel’s security perimeter has expanded, now reaching nearly 1,000 miles to Iran and entangling the United States in widening conflicts, warns Morgan Strong.

By Morgan Strong

Israel has been winning “victories” over its Arab neighbors for decades, but this military approach to its security dilemma now has left the country facing even more dangerous threats on its borders and contemplating a new war nearly 1,000 miles away against Iran.

Israel’s predicament can be traced back to the earliest years of the Jewish state after World War II when violence and even acts of terrorism were considered necessary to wrest independence from British authorities and to drive an estimated three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their ancestral homeland to make room for Jewish settlers.

Bodies of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra camp in Lebanon, 1982. (Photo credit: U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees)

Israeli officials justified these attacks as needed to build a state to protect the world’s Jews following the Nazi Holocaust and then to defend Israel’s borders from hostile Arab states, which considered the new country another Western intrusion into the Middle East.

However, over the past several decades, Israel’s military operations have shown a declining success rate, with short-term “victories” often generating only more hostility and creating ever more dangerous adversaries. That has now led Israel to view its “existential” defense perimeter as extending so far that the U.S. military is increasingly needed to help take out Israel’s enemies and protect its security.

Israel’s current problem of diminishing returns on its investments in war began to take shape when Israeli invaded Lebanon in March 1978 to push the Palestinian Liberation Organization farther from Israel’s northern border. The invasion, called “Operation Litani,” followed an attack by Palestinian guerrillas who landed in a rubber boat in broad daylight on the beach at Tel Aviv. After coming ashore, they hijacked a bus and began shooting civilians, killing 37 Israelis and wounding 76, nearly all civilians.

The resulting Israeli invasion of Lebanon was regarded as a stunning military success, accomplished with speed and minimal Israeli causalities. Twenty Israeli soldiers died, while Israeli forces killed more than 1,200 Lebanese soldiers, P.L.O. fighters and civilians.

But Israel’s new “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon didn’t stop Palestinian attacks against Israeli targets, including an attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador to Great Britain. So, on June 6, 1982, Israel drove farther north into Lebanon in an operation called “Peace for Galilee.”

Again, the invasion was extraordinarily successful from a military perspective. Israeli forces reached the Lebanese capital of Beirut in a matter of days. Then, after heavy fighting and protracted negotiations, Israel forced the P.L.O. to leave Lebanon. The P.L.O. decamped for Tunisia, though it would continue to launch attacks against Israel.

The 1982 invasion and siege of Beirut also damaged Israel’s image in the world. Israel had bombarded the city relentlessly for nearly four months. The war’s human cost was high. The approximate totals were 18,000 Lebanese and 9,000 Palestinian and Syrian troops killed. Israel lost fewer than 600 soldiers.

Israel also was widely censured for its tactics, in particular the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Israeli-supported Christian militia forces slaughtered some 500 Palestinian civilians.

Rise of Hezbollah

Another unwelcome by-product of the invasion was the creation of a new militant group in Lebanon opposed to Israel. The group, drawn from Lebanon’s large Shiite population, was at first called “the Islamic Resistance” though it is now known as “Hezbollah.”

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had promised Israelis that the invasion and conquest of Lebanon would bring Israel 40 years of peace. But in 1985, Israel withdrew to a “security zone” in southern Lebanon, while Syrian influence over Lebanese affairs grew and Hezbollah emerged as a potent liberation army.

Israel found it necessary to invade Lebanon again in 1993 following Hezbollah’s cross-border raids into northern Israel. That week-long invasion was dubbed “Operation Accountability” and Israel declared it another success.

However, Hezbollah was not deterred. Determined to drive Israel completely from Lebanese territory, Hezbollah ambushed Israeli troops and began firing rockets into northern Israel. So, in 1996, Israel invaded Lebanon again, in an operation called “Grapes of Wrath,” which again was declared a success.

Nevertheless, in 2000, confronted by Hezbollah’s continued guerrilla attacks, Israel finally withdrew all its forces from southern Lebanon. Its occupation of Lebanese territory was over, but Israel had a potent new enemy, Hezbollah, which was popular with many Lebanese and controlled southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah also gained the support of Iran and Syria, which provided the hardened guerrilla fighters with modern weaponry to continue their struggle against Israel. Bolstered by Iranian and Syrian aid, Hezbollah made the prospect of Israel winning another ground war in Lebanon less likely.

Hezbollah was equally implacable and intransigent as the P.L.O., but significantly better equipped. Hezbollah forces also were deeply entrenched throughout the hills of southern Lebanon with a series of interlocking modern fortifications.

In 2006, after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others, Israel launched another invasion of Lebanon, which became known as the “Israel-Hezbollah war.” Determined to punish Hezbollah and its civilian supporters while sparing Israeli troops Israel relied on sorties by its advanced U.S.-supplied aircraft to devastate Hezbollah strongholds across the country.

However, Hezbollah armed with rockets from Iran fired hundreds into northern Israel, 144 a day on average. The rocket attacks forced many Israelis to flee to safer locations in the south. Nearly a quarter of Israel’s population became internal refugees.

Another Lebanon War

Israel finally countered by sending in ground forces, but they met strong resistance and suffered unexpectedly high casualties. The Israeli tank divisions were decimated by Hezbollah using Iranian-supplied anti-tank weapons.

As one Israeli armored commander said: “Iran supplied the missiles, we supplied the targets.” Israeli forces became bogged down trying to wrest control of south Lebanon from the dug-in Hezbollah forces.

Israeli suffered a humiliating military defeat, the first clear loss in the vaunted history of the Israeli Defense Forces. The Israelis reported 121 troops killed along with 44 Israeli civilians, but some estimates of Israeli military deaths were much higher. On the Lebanese side, about 1,200 deaths were reported, the vast majority civilians killed in Israel’s aerial bombardments.

After 34 days, the invasion ended with a United Nations-brokered ceasefire. A part of the peace deal called for Hezbollah being disarmed. However, neither the Lebanese government nor U.N. peacekeepers moved against Hezbollah. The group remains heavily armed with sophisticated weaponry and is firmly in control of south Lebanon.

Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, Ehud Olmert, had promised that the war against Hezbollah would change the face of the Middle East forever. Instead, the war exposed Israel’s increasing vulnerability to rocket attacks and revealed surprising weaknesses in its vaunted military. Israel had shown confusion and incompetence within the military high command.

Israel also has occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, in whole or in part, since the 1967 war. Israel invaded Gaza in force in 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2010 to eliminate the military threat of Hamas, but Hamas remains a powerful resistance force, now in a coalition with the political arm of the more moderate P.L.O.

The sum of Israel’s invasions of Gaza in the final calculation is the same as the invasions of Lebanon. Following the military “success” and a period of occupation, Hezbollah and Hamas have emerged strengthened. Israel has not stopped Hamas’s ability to launch rocket attacks into southern Israel, nor has it prevented Hezbollah from attacking northern Israel.

Yet, instead of changing its strategic direction and revitalizing peace talks with its neighbors Israel has redoubled its efforts to strike at enemies even farther away, particularly Iran, which Israeli leaders condemn as an “existential” threat because of its nuclear program and its close ties to Hezbollah.

Though Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in 2007 that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons project in 2003 Israeli officials still insist that a potential Iranian bomb and Hezbollah missiles could endanger Israel’s existence, despite its own large and undeclared nuclear arsenal.

So, Israel has threatened to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the expectation among many American neoconservatives and other Israeli backers that the United States would have little choice but to join in, especially if Republicans win back the White House in 2012. In other words, the Israeli goal is to expand its security umbrella with U.S. help.

Not that U.S. military involvement in protecting Israeli security is new. Over the past three decades, the United States has been repeatedly drawn into conflicts against Israel’s enemies.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan dispatched U.S. military peacekeepers to Beirut, Lebanon. They soon became involved in the complicated Lebanese war seen as taking sides against some Muslim militias and 241 Americans were killed when a suicide bomber destroyed their barracks near the Beirut airport.

Taking Out Saddam

In 1991, the U.S. military battled another Israeli nemesis, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, after his troops invaded Kuwait. The reason given for the U.S. intervention was that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait was a threat to the safety and stability of the entire region, including Israel, which was about 500 miles away.

Though driven from Kuwait by America’s “Operation Desert Storm,” Hussein remained in power and was viewed by Israel as a continuing enemy who provided financial support to Palestinian militants.

In 2003, Hussein remained high on Israel’s enemies list when American neoconservatives persuaded President George W. Bush that the time had come to remove Hussein from power and use Iraq as a base for pressuring Syria and Iran. The neocons hoped a new Iraqi government would sign a peace treaty with Israel and help undermine regional support for Hezbollah and Hamas.

The U.S. invasion, titled “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” did oust Hussein from power (and ultimately led to his execution) but the war proved costly to the United States both in dollars and lives. Nearly 4,500 American troops had died by the time the United States withdrew at the end of 2011.

Even as the United States was being eased out of Iraq, the new Iraqi government dominated by Shiites was developing close ties with neighboring Iran, which also is ruled by a Shiite government. In other words, the neocon dreams of an Iraqi government directed by the United States and friendly with Israel were dashed by the war’s ultimate outcome.

So, Israel’s belligerency even with the support of its American backers has arguably gained little. The tragic victories, the costs of which grow exponentially, have served to create intransigence and implacable resolve among the enemies of Israel and the United States. The repetitious protocol of war, victory, war, victory, war has become a downward spiral of uninterrupted failure disguised as success.

Meanwhile, the world continues to drift nearer to another conflict, this time with Iran, which is nearly 1,000 miles from Israel. The war’s proponents again promise that military force will achieve some important gain in Israel’s security by setting back Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions.

Whatever happens, it is sure to be another military “victory” with another catchy name, but it is equally sure to further embitter Israel’s neighbors who will harbor even more resentments as they develop new plans for striking back.

Morgan Strong is a former professor of Middle Eastern history, and was an adviser to CBS News “60 Minutes” on the Middle East.

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48 comments for “Israel’s Tragedy of ‘Victories’”

Kirk Palmer

March 10, 2012 at 5:57 pm

Well said. I especially like the last two paragaphs.

jjs110

March 10, 2012 at 6:51 pm

This is a ridiculously slanted article by someone who inverts reality in order to support his anti-Israel prejudices. To mention only two blatant lies out of a litany that would take several pages to rebut, Strong states first that “violence … [was] considered necessary … to drive an estimated three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their ancestral homeland to make room for Jewish settlers.” What a crock! Besides the fact that there were indigenous Jews as well (for the last 3,000 years, long before the Muslims swept the area in the 7th century ACE!), the Palestinians fled on their own after their Arab “brothers” told them to vacate the place so they could massacre the Jews with abandon, letting the local Arabs come back and take the spoils once the killing had ended. Unfortunately for them, the Jews did not feel inclined to let the Arabs kill them with the same passivity they had let the Nazis murder six millions of them. As for Strong’s second of many other misleading statements, he inverts reality again when he say that “…another [Israeli] military â€œvictoryâ€ with another catchy name .. is equally sure to further embitter Israelâ€™s neighbors who will harbor even more resentments”. Oh really? Have these neighbors ever stopped being genocidally hostile? The only reason there is still no peace in the Middle East is the Arabs’ refusal to accept the fact that a) Israel is a reality that they need to accept and recognize, b) it is the only Jewish State in the world, as opposed to 22 Arab ones and 57 Muslim ones, and the Jews have as much right to live and be left alone as anybody else. With his skewed presentation, Strong joins the bloated ranks of antisemitic hypocrites who clamor for human rights for everybody except the Jews.

Hillary

March 10, 2012 at 8:59 pm

What is this 3,000 years propaganda repeated endestly by Netanyhu & others ?

There was NO Exodus ,there was NO Diaspora Jews back then converted to Islam and others did not.

Many Palestinians today are the decendants Jews who converted to Islam and Christianity centuries ago.

Top Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein has denied the existence of Jewish roots in the city of Jerusalem.
Proffessor Finkelstein at Tel Aviv University, said Jewish archaeologists have failed to unearth historic sites to support some of the stories in the Torah. Among those stories are the Jewish Exodus, the forty-year wandering in the Sinai desert.
That Exosus is pure fiction — apparently 3 million Hebrew men, women and children lived in the Sinai Desert for forty years without leaving a single Matzo Ball behind.

Today 80 % of all Jews are Ashkenazi of European decent originating from the Kazhar Empire, a west Asian empire that was established in the eighth century and converted to Judaism to avoid taking sides in the Islam vs Christianity wars.

In the 13th century the mongols rolled in and shut the empire down & the Kazahrs fled & established Jewish communities throughout Europe —- their historical connection to the Middle East is zero and only more Jewish mythology.

Many Jews have been prisoners of their Myths and fairy tales that were â€œdreamedâ€ up some time around 500 BC and Christians of course believe it all.

The “Jewish people” is a made-up notion, consisting of an imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually.

Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand says Jews, rather than being a race, comprise a collective of many people who have been hijacked by a national movement based on myths.

deb

March 11, 2012 at 1:46 am

You need to open your eyes and mind to the fact that the Israeli government is nothing but a n asty bully full of cowards. They want a war but want America to fight it for them. It’s what they do. Start a fight then expect us to finish it.They want us to sacrifice our soldiers and treasury. They don’t care that we are just getting out of the last war they wanted or that we will be paying for it for years.Not to mention how our wounded will be living with Israel’s paranoia and war mongering for the rest of their lives. This war they now want us to fight has nothing to do with us or our security. If Israel would just live and let live maybe they wouldn’t have to worry so much about their security.

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 4:38 am

So you admit to being a mouth piece of the current Iranian government!

Roger Thomas

March 11, 2012 at 3:58 am

jjs is so far off track, I fear he is lost forever. He has obviously been brainwashed, indoctrinated with Zionist mythology or. perhaps, a Zionist monitor tasked with peddling ludicrous propaganda. For a factual history of post-war Palestine, he is advised to read ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ by Prf. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, born and bred. There he will discover that, in between murdering British soldiers and diplomats, bombing the King David Hotel, assassinating UN officials and hanging British corporals from lampposts, the Zionists embarked on a terror campaign against defenceless Palestinian villages. The first of many such atrocities, urged on by Ben Gurion, occurred in December 1947, months before his Declaration of War in May 1948. The vile terrorist gang, the Irgun, along with the Haganah were sent by night to instil as much terror as possible. The usual tactic was to throw hand grenades into the houses of sleeping villagers and gun them down as the ran out. Survivors were rounded up and males between the ages of 12 and 60 removed and shot. Young girls were raped and pregnant women eviscerated. Anything worthwhile was looted. After a dozen or so of such atrocities, Palestinian villagers were panicked into fleeing their homes. Later, when they tried to return, they were either shot in cold blood or imprisoned and subjected to Goebbels-type experimentation. jjs might also like to read authentic accounts of the assaults on Jaffa and Haifa by the butchering Zionists.

Zionist excesses have, not surprisingly, engendered a bitter hatred of them which will last for generations and which is increasingly shared by humanitarian people worldwide and, certainly, includes me a right-wing Thatcherite Englishman. I reject the accusation that such hatred is anti-semitic. For a start, there are many prominent Jewish academics and decent Israelis who share my views. Moreover, Zionism is not a race, it is an evil, brutal cult which has jackbooted throughout the region for too long. Unfortunately, decent, civilised Israelis wiil be caught up in the inevitable decline and fall of the Zionazi regime.

Again jjs is wrong in his contention that the only reason for peace not being reached is the Arab refusal to recognise the Zionist State’s existence. In 2002, the Arab League offered full recognition of the abomination of a State, a guarantee of peace and normalisation of diplomatic relations in return for acceptance of UN resolutions over withdrawing to the 1967 ‘borders’. Not only was the offer rejected but the Zionists reneged on every agreement from Camp David to the Oslo Accord.

The Zionists are an abomination and, with their huge nuclear arsenal, a threat to the future of the World. How anyone with an ounce of humanity and compassion can condone let alone support these scum is beyond understanding.

Meanwhile, poor Palestinians, Muslims and Christians alike, suffer excessive deprivation, ongoing ethnic cleansing, destruction of their homes and livelihoods, indiscriminate arial bombardments, and the misppropriation of their land. And jjs has the gall to talk about human rights!

Zionists get out of Palestine!

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 4:33 am

Put your money where your dirty mouth is and meet this supporter of Israel on the battle field.

Roger Thomas

March 11, 2012 at 6:41 am

Do you have nuclear weapons or will the USA military be backing you up? Typical Zionazi aggression – pathetic creep.

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 9:17 am

Calm down Roger.
I meant you, personally.
Will you meet me in the battle field?
Or is that you have NO GUTS,
only verbal diarrhea?

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 4:20 am

Well said. Strong may as well be in the payroll of Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran.
Why doesn’t he come out of the anti semitic closet and declares his hate for the Jews?
The dead German corporal would be proud of this fellow.

Roger Thomas

March 11, 2012 at 10:20 am

Did you volunteer to fight for the Zionists in Iraq or did you allow the 4500 young men and women of America to die for you? If you did, then you might be a worthy opponent – if not, I would not sully my hands with a yellow belly.

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 12:19 pm

I’m in the Armed Forces.
I have combat experience.
What about you?
Hidding behind words?
Who is the coward?

One World

March 12, 2012 at 8:24 am

I think you are the coward Ted.

You are so afraid of ideas different than your own that you are happy to use violence to suppress those ideas. The point of the article is that the violence of the Jewish state is not working to achieve their goals.

Your way proves nothing. It serves to hide the truth.

Ma

March 12, 2012 at 6:24 pm

Gay or straight??

Ma

March 12, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Your beloved country Israel too has been on their pay roll when it suited her. Remember Iran Contra scandal?

DL

March 12, 2012 at 12:12 am

Much the same the Israel’s military misadventures, the constant hurling of the antisemitic epithet by Zionists such as yourself at anyone who dare voice any legitimate criticism of Israel is resulting in diminishing returns–much like the boy who cried wolf.

Strong’s article is a fairly balanced piece albeit for one glaring omission: the failure to list the genocidal tally of dead Iraqis from sanctions and war–hundreds of thousands if not up to a million souls–and something Israel was an integral part of.

John

March 12, 2012 at 8:24 pm

The few Jews who were in Palestine before Zionism was invented, had political power in the Ottoman rule, and they didn’t want these Zionist trouble makers coming and messing things up. And yes, the Jewish forces before the ’48 war had gathered intelligence on all important Arab villages. They knew who was important to control and who wasn’t when war broke out. And contrary to what you have been reading, the new Jewish historians, with more documents in their hands, state that the quarter million Palestinians where pushed out. Besides there where already 3 nearby massacres and local street terrorism on the minds of Haifa Arabs when they fled.
In this last month the Gaza power station has been down 3 times because of lack of fuel. In many areas of Gaza the children are hungry and the water is of poor quality. Sounds like Warsaw doesn’t it except these people are fighting back for their rights recognized by international law (both Geneva and UN)!!
Also Palestinian Arabs (Christian and Muslim) and those Jews already in Palestine before Zionism arose are descendants of the Canaanite people. They probably have more in common than the foreign European influx. What is going on is an 1800’s colonial agenda in the 21st century. The Boers to Africa, and the Pilgrims to the US thought they were on their Exodus.
The Old Testament is a nationalist story by a people who knew little about the world. The world was not created in 6 days, was not flooded in 40 days (40 and 400 have a lot of recurrences in the Bible) and is a great deal older than some 5,000 years.
Obviously you have been traumatized by the Zionist political intentions to perpetuate the horrors of mid 1900s in Jewish psyche for their own ends, but those who have gone outside these shadows do well in this world. When Jewish immigration to Israel was too slow for the creation of a Greater Israel in the Zionist view, they bribed Russia to let their Jews immigrate. The cost to the US was exposure of intelligence agents in the old USSR and the Pollard affair.
Excuse me, but before Zionism arose, Jews were living easily with other Palestinians. When it came out that the West decided to divide Palestine, that was the time Jews in other Arab countries felt the Arab reaction. (It was passed in the General Assembly (a lot of bribery went on) but not cemented by the Security Council) And why should a minority of Jews have received the most land and the best land. Perhaps they would like to swap Israel’s initial borders for Judea and Samaria.

Manuel Otero

March 10, 2012 at 10:43 pm

A skillful bit of Iranian propaganda! Iran may be 1000 miles away, but its allies surround Israel and give aid to assassins of US military. Arabs whine and beg on behalf of the “Palestinians” but fail to acknowledge that they expelled more than 800,000 ArabJews from 1948-52 and expropriated their assets. Unlike the Arabs, Israel is too proud to whine about those losses.
The Palestinian “invention” harks back to 1902 when the Arab Leadership feared that the Jews would establish a homeland and lured fellahin from Egypt and Syria with promises of what turned out to be swampy malarial deserts to farm. Then came construction jobs for the British mandate and even more Arab immigration. Anti-semitism is at root just jealousy.

mbp

March 11, 2012 at 12:20 am

A thousand miles is pretty far… in 1095 A.D.. Todays munitions can easily be delivered much farther and with such remarkable accuracy that any country should reasonably be expected to extend it’s perimeter’s radius that distance and more to protect it’s interests. This is not, however, about national defense, hegemony or religion. It’s about greed and avarice. If “the people” in the region really wanted peace they could have it immediately. Unfortunately, there’s too much money to be made by the “Have’s” and it’s too easy for them to manipulate the “Have Not’s”. It’s a global phenomena and part of the human condition. It has always existed and always will. People are generally greedy and/or ignorant. It’s true for all of us… Israelis, Iranians, Americans, Syrians, British, you, me, etc… (maybe not Australian Aboriginals or Tibetan/Nepalese monks.) My advice: Learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 4:42 am

Nihilists are so cute.

Dave Diesel " 81 "

March 11, 2012 at 12:51 am

Zionist Israhell with it’s traitor supporters in the Us government making
America a slave for israhell’s world domination quest is a toilet that needs
to be flushed. The Iran situation is not about the bomb which isarahell has
and is Not legal, It is all about oil and the petro dollar and as Iran has correctly pointed the world will never have any peace as long as zionism exists. Every sane person in the world knows this much to israhells dismay.
See,http://truedemocracyparty.net/2012/01/dimona-israels-a-bomb-factory-mordechai-vanunu/

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 4:48 am

Oil. Oil.
The sooner we get off oil the less money the Shiites will have to continue paying for terrorist attacks around the world.

Ma

March 13, 2012 at 9:49 pm

“…..Shiites will have to continue paying for terrorist attacks around the world.” including assassinations in Dubai using stolen passports and identities of foreign nationals and getting diplomats kicked out of at least 2 foreign capitals – Ireland and UK, yes thats right, UK.

RS2141

March 11, 2012 at 1:09 am

Israel is the cynical postwar creation of the Allies … who were half-hearted colleagues during WWII, and full-time imperialists for a long while thereafter. Accustomed to imposing themselves on “lesser sorts,” they were only to glad to eventually acquiesce in the Jewish project of creating an even bigger and more dangerous ghetto for Jews than the Pale of Settlement had ever been.

Of course America and Israel are fast friends: both countries were and are vengeful and truculent; both share a delusional belief that they comprise a “chosen people” (and that this preferment excuses the basest and vilest crimes against humanity, from mass murder in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to multiple, death-dealing invasions of Lebanon and Gaza); both are sois-disant democracies possessed by a brutish fascination with infernal killing devices … in short, both these countries not only resemble each other, they richly DESERVE each other.

If ethnocentric Israel succeeds in convincing the world that history should be rewound 2000 years to a time before the Diaspora, then I advise North Americans to prepare to return their real property to its rightful owners, viz., descendants of the First Americans, whose ancient material and spiritual claims on North America are at least as compelling as those of the European invaders and their insufferably smug and meretricious Judeo-Christianity.

rosemerry

March 11, 2012 at 3:13 am

A good post, but still allows the Israelis to seem justified in murdering their “enemies”. Jews and Arabs shared the land for millenia (despite jjs110’s whining comment), and Arab neighbours and Palestinians are not all trying to push every jew out;the Arab Peace plan would accept the 1967 borders with Israel inside them, but US and Israel refuse to contemplate peace. As the Holocaust showed, you cannot kill every one of an “enemy”; the nazis were defeated in WW2, Jews are welcome as citizens in Western lands, the “homeland” is not the only way for Jews to be safe. Israel could be a state for all its members.

Roger Thomas

March 11, 2012 at 4:10 am

A very sensible comment, Rosemerry. Is there any country anywhere striving for an ethnically pure population other that the Zionist State and is apartheid no longer a dirty word? Somehow, the Zionists have got to be stopped but they have no desire for peace until the conquest of all Palestine, and with the unconscionable support of America, the outlook is pretty bleak.

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 4:28 am

Such ignorance!
The Jewish population in Israel is not ethnically homogeneous.
The Zionist State is how Ahmadenijan calls the State of Israel.
Is there where your payment comes from?

Roger Thomas

March 11, 2012 at 6:51 am

There is no need of payment to condemn utterly such dreadful human rights abuses, war crimes and invasion of others territory. Your ignorance is manifest – but then fanatics usually are clueless about reality as you are.

As with all colonial aggressors, the Zionists will tumble one day and I pray that I am alive to see the justice in that event.

Judah the Lion

March 11, 2012 at 8:37 am

A vicious neo nazi antisemitic diatribe that confirms the bias of consortiumnews which the far left and far right have totally in common: a viceral hatred of Jews and their right to exist.

Israel is the only stable state in the region, and by and large the most reliable ally the US has there.

Let’s see how Herr Thomas, Hillary, Rosemary, Stovert, et al, would fare making the same criticism of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the other 20 something Arab countries. Never a peep about Arab atrocities against their own people, homicide bombings, no civil rights, making women less than slaves, routine antisemitic references in the Arab press, schools, and the sworn destruction of Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

Your accusation of anti-semitic bias is simply untrue and ‘the last resort of a scoundrel’. As I have said before, Zionism is not a race -it is a vicious, brutal, thieving cult. Some Zionists may be Jews but not all Jews are Zionists. No one is anti the decent Jews of Israel nor against the many Jews worldwide who are shamed by the Zionazis atrocities. IMO, anyone, and that includes you, who supports that abomination of a cult has a serious deficiency of humanity and compassion.

Ted Stovert

March 11, 2012 at 12:24 pm

I said before. All you have is lies wrapped in words.
The clear sign of a coward.
Come down to the battle field, and see how long your crafted sentences last.
I’m sure you will continue hidding.
Go back to mamma, boy.

None

March 11, 2012 at 8:21 pm

Zionism is NOT a cult, it is the political belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination and sovereignty in the land they have worshipped in prayer and longed to return to for thousands of years.

Grow up with your islamist nutjob “zionism is a cult” nonsense. You don’t know the first thing about it.

Dee R.

March 15, 2012 at 10:56 pm

A “Cult” is defined by a BELIEF. Political or otherwise. Zionism is a belief that European descendants of Japeth are Jews. Jews are descended from Shem, Abraham, Issac, Jacob and then Judah. Ashkenazi “Jews” are like Netenyahu, Einstein, and even Anne Frank have not one drop of semitic blood in them and have no anscestors that ever set food in Palestine. They conceal this information in things called “books”.

Judah The Lion

March 11, 2012 at 11:31 am

As I’ve stated before, you’re a delusional neo nazi S.O.B. period…

calm

March 11, 2012 at 12:56 pm

I have no sympathy or trust for the israeli folks.

Here we are 60 years after the Hitler-Trip and Jewish Folks are still entering courthouses across this universe and insisting on justice and the â€œRight-Of-Returnâ€ of stolen artifacts, property and jewels confiscated by Hitler and The Clowns.

I think that the Palestinian people deserve the same â€œRight-Of-Returnâ€ and the same sense of justice that the Jewish Folks insisted upon in every courthouse in the land.

Never once did I hear any Jewish Person suggest that the â€œFacts Had Changed On The Groundâ€ and thus the Jews weâ€™re not entitled to compensation for losses incurred under Hitler â€¦ but this is the claim that the Jewish Folks make with the Palestinian People and their â€œRight-Of-Returnâ€.

Following the Hitler Trip and the horrible experiences of the Jews, many left Europe and invested heavily into media and Hollywood.

Some of the same people who had just experienced and fled from the discrimination, stereotyping and racism by Hitler, only to commit the identical crime in America …. while making films about blacks and the North American Indian. It was some of these same people who fed us images of First Nations People as savages and blacks as inhuman.

Some of the same people (Ezra Seymour Gosney) who chastised Hiter for inhumane treatment of the Jewish Folks during World War II, are the same folks who encouraged and practiced eugenics in America.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._S._Gosney

These are the words spoken by the very first Prime Minister of Israel:

â€œWe must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.â€
â€“-David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978–
–Israel Koenig, advisor to the Israeli Knesset, The Koenig Memorandum (Al Hamishmar newspaper, September 7, 1976)–

“The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the proposed Jewish State could give us something we never had … Any doubt on our part about the necessity of the transfer … may lose us an historic opportunity.”
–David Ben-Gurion, 1937–

That is almost exactly the kind of statements which Hitler screamed when speaking about the Jewish Folks!

And worse â€¦.. Ben-Gurion said this at the same time that our media was parading holocaust victims across the universe and showing Jewish Folks crying and screaming â€œNever Againâ€.

In 1948, with Hitler dead less then 2 years, â€¦. At the very heart of the newly formed country of Israel, â€¦. at the highest levels of government, â€¦. within the Israeli cabinet, the Jewish folks were actually talking about committing a holocaust against the Arabs and which is the exact same crimes as Hitler was being chastised for.

Calm

Jim Faubel

March 11, 2012 at 1:46 pm

Would someone please remind the Israelis and the neo-con Christians that the Arabs are also Semites?

None

March 11, 2012 at 8:18 pm

You’re playing semantics. Nitpicking over definitions that no one uses.

When people say anti-semitic, they mean hatred of jews. When they want to say they hate arabs, they say they hate arabs.

Would someone please remind the world and specifically the “I dont hate Jews I only hate zionists crowd”

â€œWhen people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.â€ ~ Martin Luther King Jr. Go on, look it up so you dont think its just “zionist propaganda”

None

March 11, 2012 at 8:17 pm

People need to realize that if it weren’t for these Victories (and yes, they are victories because they keep the islamist hoardes out of Israel and away from their children)

The Jews of Israel would have been genocided.

Genocide. Is that something you want?

Is that really something you DENY is the goal of Hamas/ Hezbollah / Islamic Jihad against Israel?

go on… tell me its “land” or that other propaganda bullcrap “defending their homes”

YOU DONT DEFEND A HOME WITH A SUICIDE BOMBING ON A PIZZA SHOP OR SCHOOLBUS.

Judah the Lion

March 12, 2012 at 7:59 am

Another lone voice of sanity and reason on this otherwise twisted site

John

March 12, 2012 at 8:36 pm

So you cruelly displace 750,000 people from their homes, deprive many of them of good water, enough food, electricity, and protected olive groves, and abet in the murder of 3,000 at Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon. You then find that immigration is too low so you bribe Russia to open its doors to Jewish immigration to Israel and in return Pollard and others put US agents in Russia at risk and even death. Is your thinking warped !

Ma

March 13, 2012 at 10:58 pm

Yeh, birds of feather….

John

March 12, 2012 at 8:40 pm

The first suicide bombing in Israel took place after a Jewish settler opened fire in a Palestinian Mosque killing many people. And another Israeli citizen killed Rabin. No people have a monopoly on evil.

Ma

March 13, 2012 at 10:50 pm

Arabs have been ruling the Middle Eastern territories for centuries. If they were genocidal, today’s Middle East would have been without any residual jewish population. Do’nt forget those were times when Arabs were at their peak of power and there were no such entities as UN, USA or EU to stop them. Save very few examples Muslim Arab rulers treated their Jewish populations with generosity. It’s only after occupation of Palestine by the Zionists with the help of Masters of ‘Divide and Rule’ that Arab populations have turned against them. You seem an intelligent person. How could you imagine contemporary Arabs would not hate Israel where palestinian and Israeli ratio of death toll is 100:1?

Judah The Lion

March 14, 2012 at 5:07 pm

What about the expulsion of Jews who lived in Arab countries like Syria, Iraq for centuries. Don’t give me that “occupation” crap, Israel was created by the UN and was simultaneously attacked by the Arabs who stated their purpose was to destroy the Jewish state.
You neo nazi extreme leftists always have some b.s. excuse not to criticize the Arabs. Let’s at least level the playing field; it’s a pipe dream on my part. There’s no democratic forum otherwise.